As web designers, one of our primary duties is to ensure that any website we build receives the right message in the right way. And one of the critical factors in this is the use of (right) colours. Choosing a colour scheme goes beyond using your clients (or your) favourite colours or even their brand colours.
There are a lot of things to remember, and I’m going to cover most of them in this post. Branding is a massive deal in the business world, and a significant part of branding is what we call “colour branding.” Colour branding is simply about using colours to help create an identity for a company or to affect how people view a business.
So let’s say that a massive data processing company wants to be seen as reliable and trustworthy by its customers or potential customers, they might be looking for “formal” colours like blue and grey. If a hotel company wants to be portrayed as luxurious, it might use black, gold or silver.
We ‘re going to talk more about what colours you should use that will make people feel a certain way, but right now, I just want to highlight the vital role of colour in branding with this statistic:
Colour Will Increase Brand Awareness By Up To 80%
Eighty percent is a large amount, and this puts more emphasis on how you, as a web designer/developer, execute colour branding on your clients’ websites. The aim is to make sure that when people land on the client’s site, they know exactly what the business is and what they’re doing.
During your career in web design, you ‘re going to have two styles of clients:
- Type 1: Those who have already chosen a colour scheme
- Form 2: Those who still need assistance with their colours
For the first type of client, you will be responsible for incorporating their brand colour and looking for colours that complement it.
Coca-Cola ‘s website is a perfect example of colour consistency.
Red is the colour of the company, and their web development team did a fantastic job of integrating it on their website through the red stripes seen all over the site.
When viewers move through the website, they won’t forget that they’re on the Coca-Cola website because of the red colours.
What if you believe your client is using the wrong colour?
What if you think a funeral company’s choice of red conveys the wrong message?
This is where more value can and should be added to your client’s website.
Questions like:
- Why did you choose the colour of your current brand?
- How do you feel about it?
- Have you got input from your customers on how they feel about this colour?
- What image would you like your company to portray?
These are fundamental questions that will help you understand the branding issues of your client.
Colours Make Certain Elements Stand Out
When you want to attract attention to a button or a particular segment, you don’t always use big arrows or blinking neon lights.
You ‘re doing it with colours.
Colour is also used to highlight items such as arrows, essential texts and subsections.
Call-to-Action Buttons
CTA buttons are buttons that enable action to purchase a product, register for a free trial or download an eBook.
Marketers typically go through a lot of data and testing to get the right design, colour, scale, and location of the CTA button.
Why are you going through so much trouble?
Well, because having a better CTA button means more business.
What’s the right CTA colour to use?
The bottom line is that there is none at all.
While green, orange, and red are the most popular choices for CTA buttons, there is no single colour that guarantees the best conversion performance.
Rather than aiming for the “best colour,” what you need to strive for instead is to create the highest contrast.
Colours Influence How People Feel About Your Website
At the subconscious level, colour influences people ‘s interpretation more than we think it does.
It’s the central principle of colour psychology.
Research by the Institute for Color Research indicates that people make a subconscious assessment of the setting, person or product within 90 seconds of initial exposure – and that between 62% and 90% of the evaluation is based on colour alone.
Colours have different impacts on our perception, and your choice of colour can have a significant effect on the user’s first impression of your customer ‘s brand and on the overall experience of the website.
The way you use colour can increase or decrease the trust of people on the website and turn them into loyal customers or not.
If people land on your website, you want them to:
- Trust your website/business.
- Be happy enough to remain on the website.
- Persuaded to perform the requested action (CTA)
Anything you ‘re doing with your design should support these goals.
